Quotes about sex

Continental people have sex life; the English have hot-water bottles.

"Some people go on wanting [sex] as long as they live, but other people, they let it go as if it were a garment that had worn out." (Malkah, nine: REVISING THE FAMILY ALBUM)

Instead of fulfilling the promise of infinite orgastic bliss, sex in the America of the feminine mystique is becoming a strangely joyless national compulsion, if not a contemptuous mockery.

Though seemingly remote from human sexuality, shorebird sexuality is instructive because it illustrates the main message of this book: a species’ sexuality is molded by other aspects of the species’ biology. It’s easier for us to acknowledge this conclusion about shorebirds, to which we don’t apply moral standards, than about ourselves.

Behavior evolves through natural selection, just as anatomy does. Hence if sex is enjoyable, natural selection must have been responsible for that outcome.

Our sex is ultimately laid down by our genes.

There was, he remembered, far more to love than what went on in bed, but that had its place too.

[...] he can see no reason why people need to dance. Dancing makes sense only when it is interpreted as something else, something that people prefer not to admit. That something else is the real thing: the dance is merely a cover. Inviting a girl to dance stands for inviting her to have intercourse; and dancing is a miming and foreshadowing of intercourse. So obvious are the correspondences that he wonders why people bother with dancing at all. Why the dressing up, why the ritual motions; why the huge sham? — Chapter 11, pages 89–90.

Sex was pleasurable, sure, but survival was sweeter still.

“As good Catholic children, our destiny was to be guilty over sex, to have lots of babies, and to partake of the sacraments sufficiently often to assure that we’d go to heaven when we died.”

“Right,” said Bertran. “And in the fundamentalist church down the block, they learned their destiny was to be guilty over sex, to worship the flag (in defiance of the first and second commandments), and to be born again sufficiently often to assure they’d go to heaven when they died, though I’m not sure whether it was the same heaven or not. In fact, the only real difference between us and them was whether we ranked sperm or the flag slightly ahead of god.”

All men believed they had their own magics in bed.

'You think,' he persisted, 'that my life is shameful because my encounters are. And they are. But you should ask yourself why they are.'

'Why are they — shameful?' I asked him.

'Because there is no affection in them, and no joy. It's like putting an electric plug in a dead socket. Touch, but no contact. All touch, but no contact and no light.'